My daily readings 09/09/2011

He didn’t really know me, but he knew my name. We targeted him as we knew that he could put us in touch with people who could help the business take off.

He was speaking at Carnegie Mellon University and we just crashed the event. He gave us an hour of his time, heard us out and put us in touch with VCs who would give us their time.

Sergey (Brin, co-founder of Google) always said ‘scarcity brings clarity’ and I wish I’d understood that a bit better. I still believe email is outmoded and we could do something better. But it was painful.”

Lars Rasmussen confesses that he doesn’t have much of a sense of direction. But that didn’t stop him creating Google Maps, one of the world’s leading tech success stories of the past decade.

“Once you get a taste of entrepreneurship, it’s a bug that’s hard to get rid of,” he says. “Don’t tell Mark (Zuckerberg) this, but I almost had more fun when we were a struggling start-up.”

Rebekah is really onto something here. If she pulls it off, it will be a worldwide big deal. I thought I could add value so I was offered a seat on the board. Facebook allows you to have one board position elsewhere and I thought I’d choose Posse as I’ve never done anything like it before.

While people in California said that there was nothing in this, we had some friends in Australia who said ‘that’s cool’. So we decided to start a new life in Sydney and work on the idea.”

…Money woes

“There were a number of times that I thought the idea would die, but we kept going. There were two or three times when I was almost certain it was all over.

We couldn’t get people interested in the prototype, but then we nearly got capital from Sequoia, one of the biggest VC firms in the US. That was a big deal because if you backing from them, you were pretty much guaranteed to make it.